The Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority's Library & Archive is the most comprehensive transit operator-owned library resource in the United States. As the only multimodal transportation library in Southern California, we serve employees, the public, governments and research institutions around the world. Our origins date back to the days of the Los Angeles Railway in 1890, but we were reintroduced to the public by the Southern California Rapid Transit District in 1971. Our collection contains approximately 250,000 items of significance to Los Angeles transportation history from 1873 to the present. This includes 45,000 books, reports, studies, conference proceedings, plans, maps, and drawings, 20,000 microfiche reports, more than 20,000 photographs and images, over 700 videos, several thousand ephemera, and a growing collection of publicly-accessible full-text digital documents. We collect, preserve,and provide access to archival materials from our predecessor transit agencies: Pacific Electric, Los Angeles Railway, Metropolitan Coach Lines, Los Angeles Transit Lines, Asbury Transit, Los Angeles Metropolitan Transit Authority, Southern California Rapid Transit District, and the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission

Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library

The Margaret Herrick Library collects a wide range of materials documenting film as both an art form and an industry. Its holdings include photographs, posters, books, periodicals, screenplays, oral histories, and extensive clippings files on people, films, and companies. The clippings files are organized under five headings: production, biography, general subject, festivals and awards, and Academy history. The general subject files contain clippings and photographs regarding aspects of Los Angeles such as homes, studios, motion picture theaters, hotels, restaurants, nightclubs, Los Angeles as a location, museums, educational and cultural institutions, theme parks, and landmarks; labor disputes and the formation of industry-related unions and guilds are also extensively documented in the general subject files. The Academy history files provide coverage of that very Los Angeles-based activity—the Academy Awards. The library's Special Collections contain materials relating to the careers of numerous directors, producers, actors, and other craftspeople and their filmmaking work in Los Angeles. Dating from the early 1900s to the present, the materials in Special Collections include scripts in various drafts, personal and business correspondence, production memoranda, sketches, clippings, music scores, recordings, scrapbooks, artifacts, and photographs.

Pepperdine University Special Collections and University Archives

Pepperdine University's Special Collections and University Archives maintains several collections of materials related to the history of Los Angeles. The Malibu Historical Collection includes a full run of the Malibu Times newspaper (1946-present), a full run of the the Malibu Surfside News newspaper (1973-present), the John Mazza Collection of Historic Surfboards, historic books related to Malibu and its residents, audio recordings of lectures on Malibu history, and records of the Malibu Water Company, the Rindge Dam, and the Malibu Stage Company. The James Hahn Collection (1990-2005) includes materials from Hahn's years as mayor of Los Angeles and as Los Angeles City Attorney. The Elinor Oswald Collection of Los Angeles Tourism Ephemera includes brochures, pamphlets, and newspaper clippings related to museums, art galleries, and artists in the Los Angeles area. The William S. Banowsky Papers and the M. Norvel Young Papers include materials related to various civic and political events in the Los Angeles area that occurred during their tenures as Pepperdine presidents. The Pepperdine University Archives includes photographs, audio and video, publications, and institutional records that document the history of the institution from its founding in 1937 in South Central Los Angeles, to its move to Malibu in 1972, to the present time.

USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education

The mission of the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education is to overcome prejudice, intolerance and bigotry-and the suffering they cause-through the educational use of its visual history testimonies. The Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive contains nearly 52,000 videotaped interviews with witnesses to the Holocaust that were conducted in 56 countries and in 32 languages over the period 1994-2005. The c. 2,600 interviews which were gathered in Los Angeles relate to the experiences of Jewish Holocaust survivors who came to the city during and after World War II.

Southern California Library for Social Studies and Research

The Southern California Library for Social Studies and Research primarily documents and preserves the history of twentieth-century radicalism and social change through progressive movements in the greater Los Angeles area. The materials held by the library relate to the labor, peace, social justice, civil rights, women’s, gay and lesbian, and various other grassroots movements. While the library’s print holdings—numbering approximately thirty thousand books and three thousand periodical titles—range well beyond the subject of Los Angeles to socialism, Marxism, and the Cold War, its special collections focus on Los Angeles. These collections include twenty-five thousand pamphlets, fifteen hundred posters, two thousand photographs, one hundred documentary films, one hundred videos, thirty-five hundred audio tapes, organizational files for Los Angeles and national grassroots groups, and extensive subject files containing newspaper clippings, magazine articles, and reports. Among the library’s major archival collections are the papers of civil liberties defender Leo Gallagher, California Eagle editor and publisher Charlotta Bass, and Southern California Library for Social Studies and Research founders Emil and Tassia Freed, as well as papers from the Los Angeles chapter of the Civil Rights Congress, the Los Angeles Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born, the Los Angeles International Ladies Garment Workers Union, and the Los Angeles Congress of Industrial Organizations. The archival collections on the Watts Rebellion of 1965, the Los Angeles chapter of the Black Panthers, and Chicano activism are heavily used, as are the documentary films of the 1930s from the Film and Photo League and those of the 1960s from the Newsreel (SDS) collective. The library is committed to making its collections on the multicultural history of Los Angeles widely available and to working with other institutions and organizations to ensure that a broadly based historical record of the city’s people is preserved for future generations.

Craft and Folk Art Museum Edith R. Wyle Research Library Collection

The Edith R. Wyle Research Library of the Craft and Folk Art Museum (CAFAM) was donated to the L.A. County Museum of Art Research Library in December 1997 during a period of consolidation for the Museum. (CAFAM reopened in April 1999 under the auspices of the City of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department.) The Edith R. Wyle Library's holdings reflect the exhibiting and collecting interests of the Craft and Folk Art Museum. It's holdings pertaining to traditional folk art, international contemporary craft and design, professional museum practice, cultural diversity, and cultural context are significant. It's particular strengths are in the areas of Mexican and Japanese folk art, masks and masking worldwide, and the history of folk art and craft collecting. Altogether the Wyle Research Library's holdings comprise approximately 5,500 books as well as exhibition catalogs, journals, newspaper clipping and pamphlet files, posters, biographical files on contemporary craft artists (including slides), and biographical files on self-taught artists. In 1994 the Bead Society of Los Angeles donated its library collection of about 200 books, catalogs, and ephemera on beads.

University of Southern California, Digital Library

The Digital Library of the University of Southern California (formerly known as the Digital Archive, formerly known as ISLA) is an ongoing project that is building a virtual library of digitized multidisciplinary materials much of which has a focus on the Los Angeles region. Its search and retrieval software will allows these materials to be accessed using the parameters of space, time, keyword, format, or collection. The Digital Library includes: Images selected from maps and historical newspapers in the Huntington Library’s collection, including color maps created by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in 1939, the Spanish-language newspaper El Clamor Publico (1855-1859), and the Los Angeles Star (1852-1863); photographs and maps from the Automobile Club of Southern California (1892-1963); photographs of artifacts from the archaeological collection (1880-1933) of the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California; and from the University of Southern California’s collections, including the California Historical Society Collection (photographs of Los Angeles, 1860-1960), the Hearst Collection (news photographs from the Los Angeles Examiner, 1920-1961), the Whittington Collection (commercial and architectural photographs, 1924-1987), the East Asian Library (Korean-American documents, photographs, and oral histories), the Gamble House in Pasadena (architectural drawings, photographs and other documents relative to the Greene & Greene architects) (1888-1944); Texts such as manuscript documents pertaining to the activities of the Los Angeles Ayuntamiento and City Council (Los Angeles City Archives, Untitled Records Series, 1820s-1890s), newspaper clippings from the Los Angeles Examiner (1920-1961), and master’s theses and doctoral dissertations about Los Angeles written by students at the University of Southern California (1920s-1990s); Data from the historical federal censuses though 1990 and the WPA’s household survey of 1940. Because the Digital Library has arranged to digitize materials that are the intellectual property of various individuals and institutions, the downloading of some items may be subject to restrictions.

Palos Verdes Local History Center

The Local History Collection for the Palos Verdes Library District focuses on the social and cultural history of the Palos Verdes Peninsula from 1920 to the present. This fairly extensive collection includes rare books, photographs, maps, blueprints, loose-leaf materials, scrapbooks, newspaper clip-pings, telephone books, and oral history interviews—all relating to the Palos Verdes Peninsula.